28 January 2010

The Australian Classification Board (ACB) is banning depictions of modestly endowed women in adult publications and films, reports the Australian Sex Party (as in ‘political entity’, not ‘antipodean orgy’). Apparently the ACB’s reasoning goes like this: since our A cup sisters may resemble prepubescent girls, therefore naked images of them may be considered pedophilic. But of course! So if a woman sleeps with a youthful-looking adult male who’s got a three-inch penis, she may be considered a boy-molesting pervert.

The Great Moral Panic isn’t just over the pedophiliac menace. Female ejaculation too scares the shit out of our prudish bureaucrats. The ACB refuses to classify films showing women having squirting orgasms because they are ‘abhorrent’. It's bad enough that women today are bombarded with Photoshopped images of impossible physical perfection that batter their self-esteem, yet those with small chests and copious climactic emissions are now being told that they’re juvenile freaks. By their own government!

In the interest of fairness, here is the ACB’s response to the claims made by the Australian Sex Party (oh, stop sniggering). Note the ACB’s dancing around the specifics of what actually constitutes underage appearance or whether female ejaculation should be classified under ‘golden showers’, which is a banned category. Such casuistry on the part of the nation’s moral police is not surprising, given their feet-dragging on the issue of establishing an R18+ classification for computer games.

25 January 2010

But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

- Reg in Monty Python’s Life of Brian

It’s hip nowadays to proclaim oneself a global citizen, thereby impressing others with one’s espousal of an inclusive, non-judgemental, live-and-let-live philosophy which studiously avoids allegiance to a particular culture. Yet contrary to the nomadic airs they affect, global citizens actually do have preferences when it comes to where they put down roots, or at least stay for longer than the typical sight-seeing holiday. Curiously, they tend to be permanent residents of countries with longstanding traditions of democracy, the rule of law, liberalism and respect for human rights.

08 January 2010

So here we are, newly arrived in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Yet in an era of bionic prosthetics, large hadron colliders and gene therapy, media corporations pay self-styled astrologers and ‘psychics’ to cast horoscopes and tell fortunes, the charlatans’ babble splashed across newspapers, magazines and websites. And on the same payroll as the mumbo-jumbo peddlers are journalists who cannot, or will not, differentiate between science and pseudoscience.

It’s a familiar travel-guide cliché: Japan is a land of contrasts, where tradition and modernity coexist in harmony. While many elements of Japanese traditional culture embody all that is refined, sensitive, beautiful and noble, there are aspects of such traditionalism that aren’t as flattering, which fall far from the lofty reaches that the best in Japanese culture attains. Two that are especially pervasive are gender inequality with its attendant discrimination against women, and negative attitudes towards migrants.